Wayward Emotions
by Dark Hope Assassin
Summary: He asks her to take a leap of faith and give him—give them—a chance. She does reluctantly, and is infinitely grateful that he convinced her — they function a lot better as lovers than they ever did as friends. / Daiki x Satsuki, 1 sentence /


Violent punctuation abuse? I know not what you speak of.

(It's brutal. Bordering on illicit. Please forgive me. xD)

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**#1: Walking.**

Walking is one of the first things every human learns to do in this world, and walking side by side is something just as natural to the two of them – they have always lived next door, always gone to the same educational establishments, always shared supper, always been together; years later, walking together isn't just about going towards the same place – now it's more about both of them looking in the same direction, and heading toward the same goals and milestones in life.

**#2: Waltz.**

For all the grace his basketball play style has him exhibiting in all his games—making his movements seem like an almost tantalizing dance—Daiki refuses to dance, no matter where, when and why; the only dance in his life he _can't_ refuse is the waltz he has to share with his wife at their wedding party (and the newly wedded Aomine Satsuki's soft giggles at his awkwardness during the entire ordeal do nothing to make him feel any better about being forced into dancing).

**#3: Wishes.**

Sometimes, Satsuki is jealous of the boys around Dai-chan, because they can give him the one thing she will never be able to – they can be his worthy opponent on the court, the spark to light his fire that made him shine brighter than anyone else in a game; most of the time, though, Satsuki didn't mind her inability to partner him on the court in any other way than as a moral support—after all, she was the only one on the face of the planet who could fulfil her man's every other need and make all his non-basketball related wishes come true.

**#4: Wonder.**

She has always known that he isn't like other people; only when she starts realizing that her view of him has started becoming a lot more idealized and that she's starting to overlook some of his greater vices does she know that she's in trouble… and she can't help but wonder: as the person closest to him, does she stand a chance?

**#5: Worry.**

He towers above his peers with his 192 cm, he's better toned than most thanks to his rigorous work outs for the games and he's old enough to father offspring if he so damn wanted to, and still she worries about him as though he were a clueless five-year-old in need of constant care; whenever she starts getting too nagging, he gripes and grumbles but the truth is her worry flatters him—it lets him know that he's always on her mind.

**#6: Whimsy.**

Shuutoku's coach says it to his boys explicitly but Touou feel it even more powerfully than the Shuutoku players do: once a team acquires a player of the Generation of Miracles, the whole team's play style becomes focused around that single individual; however, when a team acquires a player as excessively talented and as whimsical as Aomine Daiki, pretty much the entire school lives of everyone involved change to revolve around satisfying the selfish boy's every whimsy—for her part, Momoi Satsuki is grateful to not be the only one striving hard to keep Daiki pleased, under control and watched after, for a change.

**#7: Waste/Wasteland.**

Satsuki knows that by the time they graduate from middle school, his emotional world is probably the spiritual equivalent of a barren wasteland: his comrade on the court has left him behind, his team has grown apart and the one thing that used to bring him incomparable joy (basketball) is becoming dull and pointless; each of those things on their own would be enough to break a lesser man, maybe, but not Aomine Daiki – and for that, she did admire him.

**#8: Whiskey and rum.**

It's one of Touou's infamous after parties: Daiki has a whiskey (twice), Satsuki takes a rum and soon the whole team is hammered so hard that when the ace wakes up the next day with the mother of all headaches, buck naked and in a very familiar bed (which is not his own) with a familiar petite and well-endowed feminine body in an equal state of undress sprawled over him, Daiki thinks that it's _such a fucking shame_ he can't remember anything of the previous night—it looks like it was something worth remembering.

**#9: War.**

Satsuki knows that the moment he meets an opponent worth his time, the basketball court will become a warzone; she almost can't wait to see the seriously striving to win Dai-chan from her childhood again.

**#10: Weddings.**

He isn't much of a fan of the huge, white weddings with all the frills, flowers and all that crap, but when he buys the ring he'll put on her finger, he makes up his resolve to endure whatever monstrosity she and their mothers will come up for The Day—he will endure it, cooperate and he won't make a single sound of protest about it because he knows it will make her happy and that's really all that matters.

**#11: Birthday.**

Throughout her life, Satsuki has received many birthday gifts, each better than the previous; the best and her most favourite by far comes in the form of an off-hand confession by her best friend on her 18th birthday ("Oi, Satsuki… What would you do if I told you I might be in love with you?"), accompanied by a suggestion it's impossible to say no to ("Then we should get together. Y'know, like a couple. Since you're mine now, and I want people to know. I don't appreciate anyone putting their hands on what's mine.")

**#12: Blessing.**

The first person to give their relationship their blessing is, of course, the ever-observant Tetsu: he notices the change in their dynamic even before they do and he tells them they have his full support; it feels kind of weird being egged on for something you have yet to realize you desire, but Satsuki shrugs it off—she's used to Tetsu-kun's weirdness, after all.

**#13: Bias.**

His teammates try to convince him to go to mixers with them, and he does just once to prove to himself what he already knows: none of the girls there interest him or have even a chance to hold his attention for more than five minutes; they're too noisy, too annoying, too flat, too non-observant, their topics of conversation too inane, their hair colours are all wrong and maybe, just maybe, he's a bit too heavily biased, but who cares.

**#14: Burning.**

She loves watching Dai-chan burning with passion as he plays the game he adores with the people who can challenge him; she hopes there will come a day when he'll grow up enough to burn with that same searing passion for another instead of a basketball match, because she's sure he will have so much to offer someone as a lover (if that tempestuous passion of his is anything to go by).

**#15: Breathing.**

He's just a pace away from her and he's fixing her with that quiet smouldering intensity in his eyes he reserves explicitly for the field, and she finds her breath hitching, her mind drawing blanks as he keeps closing the gap between them slowly, deliberately; when his warm breath fans against her cheek, she's lightheaded and she keeps wondering—how does one breathe again?

**#16: Breaking.**

He has a knack for breaking things and it's very evident in the way Touou often needs to replace the hoop he has broken during practice, or the headboard he's crashed when he has jumped; in light of his destructive streak perhaps she should've been more worried about whether or not he might break her during their heated episodes together, but for some reason Satsuki isn't worried at all (and is proven right not to be by the heart-stopping gentleness of his touch when his fingers are on her body).

**#17: Belief.**

Touou believes that their ace will pull them through, no matter what kind of pinch they get into—he's the fastest, the strongest, the most unstoppable scorer; they believe in him the same way that Momoi believes that if only, _if only_, someone were to beat him on court, that would bring back the Dai-chan she has always known and adored.

**#18: Balloon.**

Although she was deeply appreciative of his worry for her wellbeing and his readiness in coming to visit her in the hospital, she did believe that the "Get Well!" balloons were a huge exaggeration of her slight anaemia (a state which hardly even warranted being taken to the hospital in the first place, but, trust Daiki to be overly-protective at the least opportune time).

**#19: Balcony.**

"Pretty nice view here," Aomine says from the neighbouring balcony with the sliest smirk she has seen in a while, but Satsuki doesn't mind it when she responds, "Yeah, the view from the sixth floor is pretty nice, isn't it?"; when his expression morphs into a wolfish grin, and he tells her, "I wasn't talking about the scenery," while motioning for her to take a look down, Satsuki notices that she's gone out on her balcony dressed only in her tank top lingerie that leaves little to the imagination without a bra underneath—she dashes back inside the room and shuts the balcony door so fast you might think she was the one playing a power sport since she was 5 instead of her mischievously snickering best friend still leaning against the railing of his balcony.

**#20: Bane.**

She calls him the bane of her existence, and she whines about having to always take care of him, yet she never leaves, even when opportunities present themselves before her: he might really be the bane of her existence, but he is also one of the defining features of her life, and, before she knows it, she can't _be_ without him.

**#21: Quiet.**

The slam of her heart against her ribcage is the only sound she hears in the perfect quiet of their bathroom while she stares down at the little stick in her hand, waiting with trepidation for the tiny little thing to give her the answer to an endlessly important question she wouldn't have counted to be asking at her tender twenty-three years of age.

**#22: Quirks.**

Aomine has many quirks that she knows and she doubts that there's any way for him to surprise her anymore, since they've known each other practically their whole lives; she finds herself oddly surprised by how many more quirks his character has that she discovers the moment they start sharing an apartment together.

**#23: Question.**

In their long cohabitation—as neighbours, as classmates, as teammates, as tentative lovers—there are many questions Daiki asks Satsuki, yet the most important one he asks her in such an offhand manner that she needs him to repeat it twice for her until she manages to let it register in her mind ("What a pain! These people want only one name for the responsible individual for this thing! There isn't even room for me to write both our names in here!"; "How about you take my name then? That would make it easier to fit in there."; "…W-what?"; a sigh, a rephrasing: "What do you think about getting married?")

**#24: Quarrel.**

They fight—they fight a lot: in fact, they fight so ferociously sometimes, and so often, that they worry their friends; but that's okay, because other people don't know how much worth the effort it is in the end when in the evening, after an especially violent quarrel, Daiki's kisses are softer and sweeter than ever in their apologetic meaning when he's at fault, or how Satsuki whispers sweet nothings and words of devotion when she knows she's gone too far.

**#25: Quitting.**

Aomine says that he admires those who never quit and Satsuki finds that amusing; after all, he's the person who's the worst at quitting out of all the people she's ever met in her entire life.

**#26: Jump.**

When he asks her to date him, she is sorely tempted to turn him down: she tells him so, and explains to him why as well – they've been friends for so long that she doubts they can move on to being anything else; he smiles then, in a way that makes her heart skip, and asks her to take a leap of faith and give him a chance (she's never been more glad to have put her trust in Dai-chan's words than she had then – she would've never thought that they functioned better as lovers than they ever did as friends).

**#27: Jester.**

He's better at listening to jokes rather than making them, but on the rare occasions when she laughs genuinely to something he says, Daiki believes that it might be worth it to become a bit better of a jester if the reward should be listening to that lovely ringing giggle more often.

**#28: Jousting.**

He's never had a chance to find out—he's only ever had guy friends, some fans but never girlfriends—but Daiki discovers that he's quite the jealous type when some asshole tries to make a move on _his_ girl and Touou's ace starts doing his utmost best to trump the bastard at every turn with the same intensity he uses on the court to triumph over an especially trying opponent.

**#29: Jewel.**

He proposes to her and she accepts long before he has any ring to give her; their friends, however, find out about their engagement only after they see the red jewel on her hand and decide to ask about it (since Momoi has never really been one much for jewellery)—the facial expressions each of them pulls after she informs them are so priceless that Satsuki is going to blame herself forever for not taking a camera with her to immortalize that very moment.

**#30: Just.**

In the moments when he's buried deep within her, moving at a tantalizing pace, she's clutching onto him for dear life, with her finely filed nails digging into the skin of his back and shoulder blades, leaving trails of passion in their wake and she does one of those keening moans of hers, his name tumbling off her tongue like a mantra, Daiki knows this is just like heaven.

**#31: Smirk.**

She used to despise the cocky way in which he smirked in the beginning of high school and she distinctly remembers the overbearing desire to reach out and just smack him across the face to relieve him of that infuriating expression; she finds herself wondering when that feeling changed to bring her to the moment when one smooth smirk her way made her feel weak in the knees, cheeks aflame and heart aflutter.

**#32: Sorrow.**

When her father passes away, she's no longer a child and has long since grown out of the need of being babied but when her childhood friend embraces her wordlessly, she cries in his arms like the day she was born because she won't be able to call "Dad" anymore, no matter what kind of trouble she got in or how much she wanted to see the man.

**#33: Stupidity.**

She constantly calls him stupid—with good reason and not—and maybe he is, academically, but his excellent observation skills and the sharpness of his mind make him anything but an idiot when it comes to his relations with others; Satsuki knows that best of all and it is for that reason exactly that she keeps telling him how stupid he is—after all, only a moron or a blind man wouldn't be able to see her obvious change of heart from adoring Tetsu-kun to loving him instead.

**#34: Serenade.**

Satsuki is pretty sure that her childhood friend is absolutely tone-deaf (he used to be when they were younger) so she's completely blindsided by the discovery that he can sing and sing _well_ when Kagami dares Aomine to sing a ballad at the karaoke they go to all together one day.

**#35: Sarcasm.**

When Imayoshi suggested that the two of them get a room and do _something_ that would decrease the tension between them (with very clear intonation on what that something could be), he had been entirely sarcastic and didn't think that those two idiots would actually go ahead and heed his advice – in the locker room of the team, no less…

**#36: Sordid.**

Should anyone ask Satsuki if there had ever been a time when she'd outright hated Daiki, she wouldn't even pause before saying yes: she hated him back in first year of high school because he wasn't Dai-chan, he wasn't _her Dai-chan_, but that selfish, arrogant, _self-destructive_ Aomine; his character had become so twisted and sordid then that she'd come to despise him… but still she couldn't leave him, because regardless of what he became, she still believed that in a distant corner of his heart, _her_ Dai-chan was still alive somewhere, waiting to be brought back to light.

**#37: Soliloquy.**

Contrary to what people might think, she doesn't particularly _like_ having to nag at him for everything and anything; it's _his_ fault to begin with that she has to take such a bothersome role and it irks her endlessly when she sees how his eyes glaze over with inattention when she's trying to talk sense into him – during moments like those, it makes her think that she's really just wasting her breath… but then she considers just _how_ irresponsible he'll be if she gives up the soliloquys of trying to reason with him and she knows that, wasted or not, it's her job as his "caretaker" to do this, however bothersome she found it.

**#38: Sojourn.**

Their stay at the university dorm turns out to be a very short-lived one because soon after they move into it, Satsuki suggests that they get a place of their own, so they can share the rent; she doesn't even need to spend a lot of time persuading Daiki because he agrees easily upon hearing the idea—she finds out why only after they have moved into their new abode.

**#39: Share.**

Daiki is the sort of person who isn't into sharing his things with others but excels at forcing others to share theirs with him – it's something of a talent of his, invading people's personal space and snagging food from their plates and so on; one thing that Daiki will never, _ever_ allow, though, the one thing he will _never_ share with anyone, is his girl, and more particularly the delectable sounds and expressions she makes when he's busying himself with worshipping her flawless form – if anyone should ever traipse on them while they are being intimate, he doubts even God will be able to save whichever poor bastard ended up procuring Aomine's wrath.

**#40: Solitary.**

When Daiki falls in love with basketball, it's only natural that he'd spend all his time, energy and effort into getting better at it, into trying to be the best there is; when he becomes the best, he discovers how lonely it is at the top (What he forgets is that he's never really alone because there's always one person next to him, who follows him to the ends of Earth, but in his grief he forgets to simply look to his side to see her, standing there, despite her inability to do the same on the court).

**#41: Nowhere.**

There was nowhere else in the world—in _life_—she would rather be than where she already was: right there, next to her childhood friend, her inspiration, her lover – her soul mate.

**#42: Neutral.**

Whenever Satsuki stumbles upon her husband and daughter having a heated argument, the woman tries to remain neutral as she hears out both sides before trying to help them out in sorting their discrepancies out; she rarely begrudges them turning her into the buffer of their clashing tempers—except when they make the mistake of turning against her and incurring her wrath.

**#43: Nuance.**

His friends and acquaintances have a knack at calling him stupid, but would a person as idiotic as they insinuate he is be able to tell so expertly the thin line in the nuances of the "Dai-chan" when she calls him when she has something inconsequential to tell him from the "Dai-chan" when he's so deep in trouble he knows just from her tone that she'd strangle him if she just sees him.

**#44: Near.**

Daiki is and always has been a very physical type of person: he has no problem barging into people's personal space, draping an arm over their shoulders or waist, pulling up against someone or draping himself over people's backs—it's what he does and everyone learns to get used to it, with time; Satsuki is the person who's the most used to it, and the one who has in fact become a lot similar in that sense, so when her heart starts racing whenever Dai-chan is looking at something in her hands over her shoulder or when he's sitting next to her in the train—whenever he's so _near_ she can _feel_ him rather than _see_ him—it feels foreign, and funny… and also incredibly exciting.

**#45: Natural.**

Their bond is one of the most natural things in the world; they had always been together, so it makes sense that they would continue being together, vows of "till death do us apart" or not.

**#46: Horizon.**

She knows she has a serious problem when she spends such a long time tossing and turning in her sleep that—even if she can't see it breaking out over the horizon—the sun ends up rising before she gets even a wink of sleep; she blames Daiki entirely for this – him and his complete thoughtlessness, and just who the _hell_ kissed people _just because_?!

**#47: Valiant.**

Most of the time, Daiki is too selfish to really fit the valiant knight type; whenever she's knee-deep stuck in trouble, though, he's always there to save her and it's kind of hard to deny that he appears quite heroic in her eyes when she beholds his profile as he towers next to her in those moments.

**#48: Virtuous.**

Truthfully, she would have honestly preferred to have stayed a virgin until getting married, because no matter how old fashioned it might seem to most of her contemporaries, Satsuki found a certain amount of romance to the idea of spending the first time with your husband on the evening of the day both your lives were tied 'till death do you part'; however, the fact she isn't a maiden when she gets married doesn't make Satsuki feel any less virtuous as a new wife, and she's sure that her husband standing next to her on the altar will agree—after all, it's his fault she's not marrying him a virgin.

**#49: Victory.**

Their relationship had always been littered with many, many squabbles over various things – they were two different people, each with their own point of view, after all, so it was only normal that they'd argue a lot; Satsuki has always known to treasure the small victories she earns in those arguments of theirs and she is more than pleased with the fact that, once they start treading into the sphere of romantic involvement together, she starts earning more and more of those little victories, courtesy of having an almost omnipotent way of subduing her wilful lover (Daiki tries only once to defy her when she says "no touching of any kind" for him for a month; he never dares let things get so out of hand ever again).

**#50: Defeat.**

He'd been so upset for such a long time with the fact no one was up to par with him on the court—so upset that it had twisted his personality almost beyond belief—that he forgets that the chance of being defeated in a match is still real as long as he keeps playing; defeat is something he isn't used to, something he severely dislikes already from the bitter taste it leaves in his mouth—still, Daiki decides that losing isn't all _that bad_, when it makes her start calling him "Dai-chan" again.

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A/N: I couldn't help it. I _had_ to put the scene from Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne into the #19 prompt. Anyone who noticed it without me having to say it explicitly is my new personal hero! I also particularly liked the #23 (Question) one! And #21 (Quiet) when Satsuki is waiting for the pregnancy stick to tell her whether she's pregnant or not. xD

Don't you just dig the metaphoric way I managed to view #26 (Jump)? I'm pretty proud of myself for that one. (Considering that my initial thoughts revolved around basketball with all that jumping and dunking.) I am infinitely pleased with #39 (Share). It took a while to get it down right, and I went through several ideas before I arrived at this one. I blame it on Pidgeon's brilliant story which kind of gave me that inclination of this sentence I used for the prompt as part of my head-canon for this pair. xD And is it bad that I am shamelessly proud of #48 (Virtuous)? xD I hope #50 (Defeat) had as good and large an impact as I intended it!


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